A dynamic overview of the best new contemporary painting from around the world.
The first volume of Vitamin P, published in 2002, inaugurated a vibrant period for painting. Since its publication, a whole new generation of painters has emerged, some inspired by the artists who appeared in that book, others taking cues from new sources. Vitamin P2 introduces this new wave of painters to the world.
The vast medium of painting continues to be a central pillar of artistic practice, and Vitamin P2 presents the outstanding artists who are currently engaging with and pushing the boundaries of the medium. Over 80 international critics, artists and curators have nominated the 115 artists who have made a fresh, unique or innovative contribution to recent painting. All of the artists in Vitamin P2 have recently emerged onto the international scene, and none appeared in the first Vitamin P.
An introduction by Barry Schwabsky, who also wrote the introduction for Vitamin P, provides a broad overview of recent developments in the medium while also looking towards its future.

Vitamin P2

Arts & Photography

Schwabsky, Barry

Robecchi, Michele

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

The iconic comic created by contemporary African American artist Kerry James Marshall.\nMarshall, widely considered one of America’s greatest living painters and inspired chronicler of the African American experience, has sought to diversify the art historical canon. In the late 1990s, he began working on a series of comics in response to the absence of authentic black characters and authors in the mainstream.\nMarshall’s comic offers an alternative reality focused on the main character, Rythm Mastr, and his young protégé, Farell, superheroes whose powers derive from the seven gods of the Yoruba pantheon. Marshall’s characters debate history, philosophy, and politics in vernacular black English using the graphic novel medium to create an empowering, utopian blend of science fiction and Afrofuturism.\nInitially serialized in a daily newspaper and presented as a Carnegie International installation, it has appeared in various incarnations over the past two decades, including light boxes, paintings, graphic prints, and drawings. This volume is the most comprehensive look at the character, its genesis, and its evolution.

Kerry James Marshall: Rythm Mastr. This Is How It Begins

Marshall, Kerry James

Individual Artists

Rizzoli Electa

Bringing together more than 30 works from numerous international collections spanning almost two decades of genre-defying production, this volume presents an overview of the artist’s striking and often humorous work from the late 1990s to the present. It centers on an eponymously titled installation reconstituting the artist’s former studio within the exhibition space.

Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher

Falguières, Patricia

Kiito-San

Columns on Art: The Collected Writings of Michele Robecchi

Meet This Artist / Retrospective Press

Tavares Strachan (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Dabiri, Emma

Delahunty, Gavin

Born in South Africa in 1976, Berlin-based Robin Rhode uses the barest of means to comment on urban poverty, the politics of leisure and the commodification of youth cultures. Drawing plays a crucial role in his inventive, witty and playful performances, photographs and video animations, which are often created on the street, and entail Rhode, mimelike, interacting with two-dimensional representations of everyday objects--for example, drawing a candle and attempting to blow it out, or painting a bicycle and trying to ride it. Recently, he has moved toward more abstract forms in paintings and drawings and has also begun to make sculpture. Robin Rhode: Who Saw Who, a generously illustrated volume, is published concurrently with an exhibition at The Hayward, London and introduces a discourse on the dynamic work of this rising young artist.

Robin Rhode: Who Saw Who

Rosenthal, Stephanie

Sey, James

Hayward Gallery Publishing

Anna Freeman Bentley (b. Freeman, 1982) is a painter based in London. Her practice explores the built environment, architecture, and interiors, inviting emotive, psychological, and semiotic readings of space. With an intense, regularly dark palette and energetic yet often intricate brushwork, her paintings depict all manner of places – derelict factories and warehouses, baroque buildings, shops, cafes, new-build homes, and modern industrial and corporate architecture. With a particular focus on the relationships between the design of architecture, its function and use, how these uses change over time, and how streets, areas, communities, and cities decline, regenerate, and gentrify, Freeman Bentley’s practice documents the changing vocabulary of architecture and captures some of the complex dynamics, atmospheres, politics, and states of mind that these places engender. This, the artist’s first monograph, features over forty paintings spanning her career to date, offering a journey through the built environment that takes the viewer into realms as diverse as psychogeography and heteropias, romanticism and modernism. From the needs and desires of individuals to those of the different communities that make up urban life in cities and towns today, her paintings open up questions about displacement and replacement, decay and rebirth, change and transformation, public and private, social and economic mobility, aspiration and desire, buildings and people. Seeking to go beyond the visible and tangible and to explore her own faith as a practicing Christian, Freeman Bentley’s work looks through the fabric of our physical environment to ask about what lies behind, into the dialogue between matter and spirit. The publication features newly commissioned texts by London-based curator and writer Michele Robecchi, New York-based art writer and editor Marina Cashdan, and Ben Quash, Professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College London. Edited by Matt Price and designed by Joe Gilmore / Qubik, this hardback monograph presents the arresting and engaging work of one of the UK’s most promising emerging painters. Freeman Bentley studied painting at Chelsea College of Art and Design before graduating with an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2010. She has had solo exhibitions in Berlin, Venice, and California, residencies in London with the Florence Trust and with Pied a Terre Michelin-starred restaurant, and participated in group exhibitions including the Prague Biennale and the inaugural East London Painting Prize, 2014.

Anna Freeman Bentley: Mobility and Grandeur

Cashdan, Marina

Quash, Ben

Anomie Publishing

Showcases Anna Freeman Bentley’s paintings exploring the tension between reality and fabrication in spaces.\nAnna Freeman Bentley (b. 1982) is an artist based in London. Her painting practice explores unpeopled architecture and interiors, the objects, decoration, and furniture inviting both narrative and abstruser consideration. This publication, Complete Reality, documents Freeman Bentley’s latest series of paintings, which she created after visiting the film set for My Driver & I (2024), a coming-of-age drama set in the port city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.\nOver the course of the shoot, Freeman Bentley took over two thousand photographs, which she edited and worked from in her London studio. The paintings show lavish rooms, filled with fringed lamps, dusty chandeliers, vast mirrors, and ornate furniture, juxtaposed with the incongruous signs of a film set: screens, leads, computers, and plastic chairs. Exploring the relationship between "reality" and "fabrication", the series continues the artist’s interest in spaces that have an inherent tension or transience.\nAlongside the paintings that comprise Complete Reality, the publication also includes a series of oil studies on paper that explore additional rooms, angles, and spaces from the film set. Installation images of the artist’s most recent solo exhibitions – Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris (2024), make shift at Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz (2024), and Complete Reality at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2024–25) – showcase the works staged in different configurations and gallery environments.\nIn her introduction, Jennifer Higgie considers the interiority of Freeman Bentley’s elusive scenes, and her interest in temporary and unreal spaces. The curator and writer Elisabetta Fabrizi interviews Freeman Bentley about the interplay of reality and illusion in her paintings. They reflect on themes of authenticity and narrative tension, and discuss Freeman Bentley’s earlier explorations of cinema, particularly Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Kathryn Lloyd writes about the conceptual and historical relationships between cinema, photography, and painting. She analyzes how Freeman Bentley forges an interdependence between these three distinct media, creating an unmistakably painterly language that somehow distils the essence of both film and photography.\nIn an interview with Michele Robecchi, the artist discusses her recent solo exhibition in Switzerland, make shift. Freeman Bentley reflects on her personal connections to the work, the significance of the temporary and transitory nature of the film set and her use of triptychs, mirrors, and fragmentation to disrupt conventional readings of space. In her contribution, the film producer Georgie Paget offers a speculative film script based on the exhibition Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris.\nEdited by Matt Price and designed by Joanna Deans, the book is published by Anomie Publishing, London.

Anna Freeman Bentley – Complete Reality

Freeman Bentley, Anna

Lloyd, Kathryn

Fabrizi, Dr Elisabetta

The world's most famous portraits and the hidden stories behind their subjects are explored in this fascinating and highly entertaining book. Portraiture is one of the oldest and most studied genres of art. While most scholars will look at a painting's composition, style, and themes, often questions remain unanswered--who were these people and why were they painted? This entertaining book reveals the identities and lives of some of the most famous characters that populate art history--from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Readers will learn how the fifteen-year-old subject of da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine nearly destroyed a marriage; that van Dyck's depiction of Prudence in wild clothes is actually one of the most controversial aristocrats of the seventeenth century; and that Francis Bacon's character George Dyer was a man he met in a Soho nightclub. These and other stories behind works by Picasso, Klimt, Rubens, Warhol, and dozens of other artists show how portraiture remains one of the most enthralling genres. Based on art scholarship and conveyed in an accessible tone, these fascinating tales of power, lust, intrigue, jealousy, vengeance, and romance will help readers understand masterpieces of art history in an entirely new light.

Portraits Unmasked: The Stories Behind the Faces

Bonazzoli, Francesca

Humor & Entertainment

Prestel

De Mona Lisa a los Simpson

CATTELAN, MAURIZIO

Lunwerg Editores

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Books by Robecchi, Michele